An Understanding of Kindness

Not that long before he died, Seamus Heaney was asked at the end of an interview if he had any wise words of advice to offer to the world. The interviewer must have waited in some considerable state of excited anticipation for the great man's answer, an answer which would inevitably be discussed and dissected eagerly in academic circles world-wide; picked and pored over by eminent scholars for decades, at least. After all, this man was a world-famous poet, a deep thinker, a man of extraordinary learning, a Nobel Laureate.Heaney's answer was quiet and unadorned: "We should be kind to one another."‘Well', you might think, ‘that's simple enough to understand. Don't we all know how to be kind to one another! Don't we all know what kindness is!'But do we? Do we know what kindness really is?A powerful poem by another poet, Naomi Shihabo Nye, takes us to the compassionate, empathic heart of kindness:"Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth.What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness."

And further on in the poem Nye says:"Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.You must wake up with sorrow.You must speak to it till your voicecatches the thread of all sorrowsand you see the size of the cloth."

Kindness can only be understood and fully appreciated if we know what it is to be vulnerable: to be painfully aware of the ephemerality of all earthly things; to know the shocking reality of loss, of grief; to be on intimate terms with sorrow. Then, and only then, do we understand kindness as the only thing that makes sense."only kindness that raises its headfrom the crowd of the world to sayit is I you have been looking for,and then goes with you everywherelike a shadow or a friend."Richard Rohr reminds us that it was not zealotry nor righteous indignation, but ‘deep sympathy for the human condition' which drew Jesus into a ministry of healing and forgiveness. A ministry of kindness.